A former Database Administrator, since 2015 Forrest-Beckett’s practice has been pushing the boundaries of the grid systems she felt confined working within.
While contemplating the work ethic that she had inherited alongside that which she had picked-up along the way; the first associated with physical graft and the second more mentally demanding, she pushed her technological automation tools to one side and started to build-in-time, to slowly-process digital matters, as matter.
Forming digital-physical mashups made-up from familiar aspects of work {databases, spreadsheets, computer code, building, cleaning, decorating} and the influence of working alongside adverse life events {identity fraud, a broken heart, financial insecurity, family disruption, a pandemic, climate emergency, global unrest}, on mass, as matter(s) accumulate and content begins to fall out of context, she takes a {psycho, techno, archaeological} approach to unearth the {dis, ordered}, {ill, disciplined}, {mis, informed}, and {mal, formed}.
Incorporating the grid as a device for mapping correlations between form, media and reference, she compiles colour codes and a play on words and signs, which become a form of pattern language. Recent work has started to incorporate elements from her ‘Playlists’ and ‘Filmography’, wherein, cinematic split screens rupture the illusion of a frame as a seamless view of reality and an eclectic mix of lines from films scripts and rhythmic cues fall out of sync with their visual counterparts, requiring deep listening to attune to the matter in hand or skips and shuffles, in which, to find a groove and dance around the heart of the matter.
If Forrest-Beckett’s practice is not film making or worldmaking per se, it could be considered a form of multiverse that lacks any single ruling or guiding power, wherein, ‘the shifts’ in the changing patterns of her work behaviour speaks to potential re-formation needed to change the structure of underlying systems that can shape and restrain behaviour.
The overarching principle could be considered as centring around what could be termed ‘a mattering of incoherence’, wherein, she curates constellations within installations, as a manifestation of an inconclusive language.